This sermon is part of our 2024/5785 High Holiday sermon series, featuring sermons by alumni of Clal’s clergy training programs.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
I’ve heard this opening line of Anna Karenina quoted a hundred times, maybe more, but it’s only recently that I began to question whether I believe it to be true. After reading and rereading this morning’s Torah portion (Genesis, Chapter 21), I’m starting to think that unhappy families share a common characteristic, a way of relating—or not relating—to one another.
Tom Hoopes, former reporter and executive editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith and Family magazine, who together with his wife, served in the Family Outreach lay ministry of their church, describes unhappy families as “Tending toward maximum entropy: the moody withdrawal of every family member into their own world.”
This description strikes me as particularly fitting for the Biblical family we encountered in this morning’s Torah reading. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Hagar, and Ishmael continue to experience tremendous turmoil in their family life, which ultimately leads to their complete estrangement from one another.
Let’s begin with Sarah:
(Gen 21:9)
We can’t be sure about what Sarah sees Ishmael doing: mitzachek, can be translated as laughing, playing, teasing, taunting, bullying, abusing. It comes from the same root as Isaac’s name, which means he will laugh. This seems to hint that whatever this mitzachek behavior was, Ishmael was engaged in it with his brother Isaac.
Sarah’s response indicates that she perceived Ishmael to be hurting Isaac. She says to Abraham:
Sarah is any parent who ever felt an urgent desire to protect her child from harm.
The Torah also gives us some insight about Abraham’s parental instincts: “This matter was very bad in Abraham’s eyes with regard to his son.” (Gen 21:11) It is unclear, however, which son Abraham is worried about, since Abraham doesn’t respond to Sarah; he doesn’t speak at all, according to the story as it is told.
The next verse reports that God intervenes, to comfort Abraham and perhaps to help this family find a way out of their misery: “Don’t be distressed about the boy and about your maid; everything Sarah tells you shema b’kolah, listen to her voice.” (Gen 21:12)
You probably hear the word shema, “listen,” and understand it to mean “obey.” Most commentators agree with you. What happens next in the story also makes sense if shema means “obey.” After God reassures Abraham, saying, “As for the son of the maid. I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your son” (21:13), Abraham gets up early the next morning, gives Hagar bread and a single bottle of water and kicks her and Ishmael out.
But the Torah doesn’t explain why Abraham obeys Sarah, despite his distress. One twelfth-century rabbi, Radak, interprets Abraham’s action as a reflection of his desire to preserve his relationship with Sarah: “Sarah’s request to expel his son was a source of great chagrin to Abraham, but he kept his feelings to himself and did not express anger at his wife, because he was concerned about shalom bayit, peaceful family relations.” Radak says the importance of marital harmony is central to the story.
Perhaps Abraham remembers the past arguments between Sarah and Hagar (Chapter 16) and the turmoil it caused at that time. Not wanting to repeat this pattern, he obeys Sarah, understanding God’s implied command of shema b’kolah to be instructing him to focus on shalom bayit, peaceful martial relations.
Marsha Pravder Mirkin, a 21st-century clinical psychologist and Resident Scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center, proposes another way of understanding this Biblical family’s troubled relationships. In “Hearken to Her Voice: Empathy as Teshuva” in Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holy Days, she suggests that we view this text with a broader lens, in order to see Sarah’s behavior and Abraham’s response with a greater sensitivity to Sarah’s feelings.
By the time Isaac was born, Abraham already had thirteen years to develop a relationship with Ishmael. Seeing this strong bond, Sarah worried that Ishmael would be Abraham’s heir along with Isaac. Driven by her fear and insecurity, unable to express her fears directly to a man who previously had been unable to listen to her, Sarah demanded of Abraham that he turn out Hagar and Ishmael.
As we’ve already discussed, God intervened and told Abraham to listen to Sarah’s voice shema b’kolah and then promised to make nations of both of his sons. Traditional interpretation takes these verses to imply that God meant for Abraham to obey Sarah.
Mirkin reminds us, there’s
a world of difference between listening to her voice and obeying. Sarah was distraught she was lonely, she was frightened. She needed Abraham…to listen to her feelings… She did not need him to take action, nor do we need to hear God’s words as a request that Abraham take action… I believe God was saying, “Listen to Sarah, hear her feelings… Then, let her know there’s no reason to compete, there’s room enough for both boys to grow up with my blessings.” Abraham, instead acted. He didn’t listen or question, but simply turned his son into the wilderness where he could die. After Sarah tells Abraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael, we never hear another word from her. I imagine a lonely, jealous, loving, wise and sometimes shortsighted woman waking up the next morning to discover that Hagar and Ishmael are gone, that Abraham took literally the words she meant figuratively.
Mirkin’s interpretation suggests that Abraham misunderstood God’s cue to listen to what Sarah was saying and to initiate a dialogue that was sensitive to her distress as a mother.
Reflecting on the fact that after the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, Sarah does not appear again in the Torah until her death, Mirkin imagines Sarah is horrified at the turn of events that led to the abandonment and possible death of Ishmael, “that she felt so guilty that her words wronged others so severely, she vowed never again to hurt another with her words. Then she silenced herself.”
We’ve focused mostly on Sarah’s perspective as a mother and spouse. I’d like to share one last thought about Hagar’s experience as a mother—a mother whose child is in distress—which comes toward the end of our story.
When their water runs out, Hagar places Ishmael under a desert shrub, sits at a distance and says to herself, “Let me not see the boy’s death.” Then, we read the words:
God hears Hagar’s whispered prayer that she not see her son die. God hears the voice—the cries of hunger and thirst—of Ishmael. God hears what is said and what is left unsaid, because God listens deeply and compassionately and with love. I think this is essential lesson we’re meant to learn from today’s Torah reading: Shema b’kol! Listen to your loved one’s voice! Listen, like God listens!
This is how to repair frayed family relationships.
In his piece about Happy Families, Tom Hoopes quotes Pope Francis, speaking at the World Meeting of Families in 2015, as saying: “In families, there are difficulties. In families, we argue; in families, sometimes the plates fly; in families, the children give us headaches.” Then Hoopes suggests that “Tolstoy could have said every family is alike.” Making an emphatic exception for families in which there is chronic physical, emotional or other abuse, he writes that all of us face the same shortcomings, the same failings.
A child called a parent a name no one else has called them.
One spouse failed the other in a terrible way.
A parent may have done something unforgivable.
“But unhappy families are those fixated on injury. . . unwilling to move on. The difference isn’t that unhappy families sin and happy families don’t; it’s that happy families forgive.”
Pope Francis offers another relevant teaching for us as we think about teshuvah, repentance, and about the struggles of this Biblical family and about our own struggles: “God’s love for us [for all human beings] opens a path forward…the family can be a factory of hope.”
We need to stay on this path.
If we follow God’s example in this story, deeply listening to the voices of people—people in our families of origin, people in our chosen families, people in our community-family—and we’re able to hear their distress, and we’re able to respond with compassion and with love, and we continue to seek shalom bayit, peaceful relations in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our synagogues, in our communities, then we will surely find forgiveness in our hearts and find the path forward in the year ahead.
Rabbi Pamela Jay Gottfried (she/her) is excited to serve as the rabbi at Congregation Beth Tikvah in Marlton, NJ. Since her rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1993, Gottfried has taught in churches, colleges, community centers, mosques, retreat centers, schools, summer camps, and synagogues. She is a member of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association (RRA) and the Interim Ministry Network (IMN). Most recently, she served congregations in Metro Atlanta, as an interim rabbi at Temple Kol Emeth and the second rabbi at Congregation Beth Haverim. She previously served as the Dean of Jewish Studies at The Weber School and taught ceramics and Judaics at Camp Ramah Darom. As an artist, she incorporates creative expression and message-driven art in her teaching of teens and adults.
A strong proponent of pluralism and innovation, Gottfried is a board member of Bayit , a collaborative community creating tools and resources for how people are doing Jews now. She is an alumna of Clal’s Rabbis Without Borders and LEAP fellowships, where she trained to help people access Jewish wisdom and culture to enrich their lives.